Amazon Prime: Same-Day Folly in an Age of Collapse By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker Bureau of Post-Imperial Logistics PARIS—Somewhere in the 18th arrondissement, a courier on a subsidised e-bike is zig-zagging between cigarette smoke and existential dread to deliver a single tube of Japanese toothpaste to a graphic designer who forgot to floss. She will unwrap…
Memphis, Tennessee, is having a moment, and the planet is watching with the same expression your aunt uses when she learns you’ve taken up taxidermy: equal parts fascination and pity. From Berlin techno clubs sampling Three 6 Mafia at 3 a.m. to Singaporean analysts Googling “FedEx hub throughput,” the river city once famous for mud…
Jatinder Singh, a name that sounds like it was auto-generated by a visa-processing algorithm, has quietly become the Rosetta Stone through which the world deciphers its own absurdity. The 37-year-old Punjab-born, Toronto-schooled, Dubai-resident management consultant is not famous—yet he is precisely the kind of un-famous person whose itinerary now carries more geopolitical weight than most…
Jets Gipson: One Man’s Layover in the Age of Perpetual Turbulence by Dave’s Foreign Correspondent at Large ZURICH—At 06:17 CET, somewhere between the espresso machine and the duty-free Toblerone, a traveler named Jets Gipson became an unwilling global metaphor. His name ping-ponged from Jakarta timelines to Lagos group chats, translated into Cyrillic hashtags and mangled…
Shrimp: The Tiny Crustacean Steering the Planet They arrive pink, curled, and eerily compliant on cocktail platters from Dubai to Detroit, but the global shrimp economy is anything but docile. Beneath the cocktail sauce lies a supply chain so tangled it could double as a hostage negotiation: mangroves in Indonesia become fish-meal in Norway, which…
Padres Game: America’s Pastime as Global Gladiator Spectacle By Our Correspondent Who’s Seen Cricket Riots and Calcio Fistfights PETCO Park, San Diego—While the rest of the planet debates grain-export corridors and which despot has the shiniest nuclear toys, 42,067 sunburned souls here have arranged themselves into a neat capitalist mandala to watch grown men in…
Mariners Score: One Run, Nine Innings, and the Entire Planet Holding Its Breath By Dave’s Locker Global Correspondent SEATTLE, EARTH—Somewhere between the Boeing fuselage graveyard and the world’s last functional espresso machine, the Seattle Mariners eked out a 3-2 victory over the Toronto Blue Jays last night. The box score reads like a haiku: three…
Steelers: The Global Supply Chain’s Rust-Belt Avengers By Diego “Rust Never Sleeps” Morales, International Desk, Dave’s Locker PARIS—On a rain-slick boulevard outside the Chinese embassy, a delegation of French steelworkers is politely waving baguettes at a line of stone-faced diplomats. Their placards read “Acier = Avenir,” which roughly translates to “Steel = Future” and, more…
When the First Temple fell, the rabbis didn’t immediately issue a press release about resilience—they just kept the lights on, one thirteen-year-old boy at a time. Fast-forward 2,600 years and the barmitzvah strand, that slender coil of tzitzit dangling from a suddenly taller teenager, has become a surprisingly accurate global barometer. From the marble synagogues…
